Paul
Can you imagine what makes a web application work effectively? Basically, the web application architecture plays an essential role in setting up the foundation of your business app. It is important to understand the concept, features, and function of architecture to work with it in order to meet your business goals and requirements.
Web app architecture with great features and intuitive interface can provide you a seamless experience. Also, it minimizes the chances of app downtime and crash. You need to choose a right architecture for your business, now the question is how to choose the best architecture? It is indeed quite challenging, unless you know what is Web application architecture, its components, and modules. Well, worry not, here we will discuss all about web app architecture.
What is Web Application Architecture?
Web application architecture is a framework which connects different components to provide seamless web experience. It facilitates the Internet browsing and interactions among elements, databases, user interfaces, and servers in an application. It is a kind of layout that logically defines the connection between the server and client-side for a better web experience.
Web app architecture structures the future design of your app including its IT infrastructure, user experience, application modules as well as the marketing and monetization of your future web application. Some of the parameters to determine the quality of web app architecture are:
- Level of security and stability
- Processing speed
- Component reusability
- Simple and clear code
- Scalability of the app and its components
- System automation level
In order to design high-level web architecture, a variety of things need to be considered including the various tasks of your business, some marketing factors, etc.
Why Web App Architecture is required?
Since you already know, web application architecture design is the backbone of your app and is the first stage of app development. Now, what makes web app architecture so important?
Web apps architecture set up a firm foundation which helps your app to sustain the changes and massive growth of your business. Market trends keep changing and you need to stay updated with them to meet user expectations and grow your business speedily.
Secondly, if the foundation is strong and stable, the further stages of app development will be fast, smooth and cost-effective. However, if you have not taken care at this critical stage, it will affect all the other stages of software development, slowing down the development process.
High-level and powerful web app architecture has the ability to deal with the requirements of your growing business effectively and provide amazing user experience that further improves the app performance. It also helps you reduce the development time by performing various development tasks at the same time and separating the structure into several small modules.
Additionally, it makes easy to incorporate new functionalities and features without disturbing the overall structure. For the security concerns, web architecture separates the app into numerous blocks which reduces security threats and risk posed by malicious codes.
Web Application Components
Web application architectures include application components, middleware systems, and databases. Web app components are majorly divided into two parts:
- UI/UX components
- Structural components
User interface components include web page’s display, activity logs, configuration settings, dashboards, statistics, widgets, notifications, etc., to improve user experience. It is a visual interface of a web application and has no interaction with the architecture.
Structural web components contain client and server components. The functionality of web apps and activities like interaction with the browser are part of client components. These components are basically built up with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
On the other side, server components can be divided into two parts, one is a web app server that manages business logic and another is database server that stores data. Server components are generally built up with PHP, JAVA, Python, Node.js, .NET, and Ruby on Rails.
Models of Web Applications
There are different models used to create above mentioned components. It is always recommended to choose the best model for an excellent app performance. An experienced web developer can help you choose the best architecture model as per the type of web app you want to develop. Let’s have a look at all the available options:
- One web server, one database model- it is an old model which has only one server and database to manage all requests. The problem occurs when server goes down, as the app will also will not work that moment. However, it is a good choice for startups because it does not cost you much.
- Multiple web servers, one database model- it minimizes the risk of data failure as a backup server is always available if one server goes down. But, it has only one database so the chances of website crash are still there.
- Multiple web servers, multiple databases model- it makes certain to keep app’s performance intact as there are two options for database storage. You have the choice to store identical data on all the databases or distribute it evenly among all servers.
Types of Web Application Architecture
It is very important to choose the most appropriate architecture to meet all your business requirements effectively. There are several factors you need to consider including app logic, features, functionalities, business requirements, etc when selecting architecture. Web apps are mainly divided into four types below:
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Single Page Application Architecture
Single Page Applications (SPA) provides seamless, intuitive and interactive user experience to all its app users. SPAs can load a single web page and reload the requested data on the same page with dynamically updated content, without interfering the functionality of rest of the web pages.
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Micro service Architecture
Micro service architecture is an easy-to-use and a seamless architecture. The best part of it is its services which are loosely coupled to be developed, tested, maintained, and deployed independently. These services can help you resolve complex problems of your business by communicating with other services through APIs. It is a great alternative to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and monolithic architecture.
Monolithic architecture has tightly coupled components so the performance of web apps gets affected. Micro service has fixed this problem by breaking the application up into multiple individual service components. Some of the popular businesses using microservices are Amazon, Netflix, SoundCloud, Comcast, and eBay.
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Serverless Architecture
In the Serverless architecture the entire execution of code is managed by cloud service providers. You are not required to deploy them manually on your server. It allows developing and running applications without any manual intervention on the servers. It enables you focus on developing a high-performance, scalable and reliable products.
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Progressive Web Applications
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) is designed and developed by Google to be able to build native functionality apps with increased capabilities, reliability, and easy to set up. PWAs support multiple browsers and you can run them on any device including a tablet and a desktop as well. You can share these apps through URL instead of the app store.
They are easy to install and works effectively even with poor internet connectivity and in offline mode as well. Some of the popular brands using PWAs are Uber, Aliexpress, Alibaba, Pinterest, and Starbucks.
Conclusion
Architecture plays an important role in the success of a web application. It is very essential to go along with the latest market trends to make your web app a hit. You need a team of experienced professionals to help you with making decision about a right framework and most suitable architecture for your business.
Web application architecture is the foundation of any web-based solution, therefore success or failure of a solution greatly depends on your architecture. You must make sure to figure out technical requirements, your business goal and selection of a right technology for ensuring great benefits.
